A solo exhibition featuring two new films by Uruguay-born Alejandro Cesarco. These works continue Cesarco’s investigation of the narrative and affective possibilities of conceptual art. Both films are re-enactments or translations which push the resonant limits of narrative, enacting processes of remembering and forgetting.
Everness (2008) is a looped film installation made up of five chapters: a remake of the very last scene of James Joyce's "The Dead," a monologue on the meaning of tragedy, a breakfast scene, and two songs: a Tropacalista melody penned by Caetano Veloso during his exile from Brazil, and a republican chant from the Spanish civil war. The work describes ideas typically associated with youth—a first love, the loss of innocence, a sense of sincerity and political commitment. But it unfolds in an uncertainly tense domestic space that seems at once both interior and exterior, between a naïve present and an evocative past.
Zeide Isaac (2009) is a work of fiction rooted in reality, produced collaboratively by Cesarco and his grandfather Isaac, who is 94 years old and a survivor of the Holocaust. Whereas standard testimonies of survival presuppose an overriding fidelity to events, here Cesarco has written a script that his grandfather performs, as both actor and witness. As one of the last of his generation, he embodies the transfer of these narratives from first to third person. His performance is a reflection on the act of memory, and the limitations and possibilities of testimony as meaningful form.
New York City, NY; NYC